Iron
by In Pieces
Summary: And now, he could understand why Steve Rogers wanted to hold on to whatever humanity was left inside of him, even if he wasn't the Bucky Barnes he was looking for, not anymore.


He knew him. And that was all he could remember.

The Winter Soldier filled a bathtub with warm water and submerged his body in it slowly. His hands gripped the edge of the tub tightly, and he didn't bother to look at the damage he'd done when he heard the marble snap and cut open his palm, the one made of flesh and bone. Remains sunk to the tub and some fragments fell onto his legs. He paid no attention to them.

He could hear noises outside of the hotel room. The sound of footsteps and high heels echoed from the empty hallways along with voices that spoke a language he understood but couldn't bring himself to answer why, filtrating from the paper thin walls. It was a Romance language, not as refined as Italian and lacking the distinctive nasal vowels of Portuguese and French…Spanish, his mind concluded at last, and for a fraction of a second he pictured the brick walls of Barcelona's Castle of the Three Dragons illuminated by street lights. He'd never been there.

He stared blankly ahead to the mirror in the medicine cabinet, taking in his image from the black circles under his eyes to the dried blood smeared on the top of his head before lowering his head into the water.

By the time his face made contact with the water, it had turned lukewarm.

There were things that were too familiar for him: the weight of a rifle, the slight movement his shoulders made with recoil, the cracking sound of bones splitting in half, the long-lasting muffled gasp for air as a trachea was squeezed tightly and the feeling of warm, oozing blood on his hands. He could hear the sounds if he concentrated enough in a loop of sound and a flash of an image.

But the emotion he experimented at the moment felt both familiar and foreign.

_Impotence._

He could see images crossing his mind as fractions of what once had been memories. He saw flashes of color and gestures, objects and blurred faces. And as he tried to cling to what could be lucid images, he found himself wandering further back into the dark depths of his mind where there was nothing there but a ghost and emptiness. Waiting for a command. A purpose.

He felt the oppression on his chest tighten by the lack of oxygen. He remained underwater.

Steve...He'd called him Bucky. James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky was a nickname.

They called him Winter Soldier. He was a weapon, a tool to mold the world into a better place, an achievement that lasted through the ages against common afflictions.

There was a flash of a khaki military uniform and a gentle smile from pink colored lips. The smell of tobacco and alcohol invaded him before shifting into the smell of burning wood; burning wood became gun powder and the khaki uniform with golden buttons became a bloodstained lab coat.

The tub's water was cold now, yet not as cold as the snow that had been under his body and soaked his clothes, numbing his flesh.

He could see a hazy image of his body being dragged across the snow and the crimson and gory mess of his severed arm that left a trail on the pale snow; the blood was thick and spouted out from the wound in large quantities unlike the weak flow that came from cut on his right palm.

He saw his hand reaching over to a handgun and pulling the trigger without hesitation to featureless face that stumbled back with the impact of the bullet and grimly splattered the wall behind with blood and pieces of skin and brain.

Those pictures seemed unreal, induced and imaginary. It felt like something had simply planted sequences on his brain without purpose and meaning. He couldn't recall solid details that he could hold on to, only a small portion of certain things: widening eyes and lips parting and quivering in fear, hollow eyes and meaningless smirks, trembling voices and commanding tones.

There was a part of him that wanted to believe that water was a conduit to the foreign parts of his mind. After all, it took a vast amount of it to let his fingers unclasp the metal structure of the helicarrier and dive into the depths to pull out Steve Rogers's unconscious body towards safety.

He needed to remember why he did it; why that action sparked something buried deep into his mind to make a breach into what should have been an order he had to endure without mishaps.

His visit to the Smithsonian brought nothing to his clouded mind but details that he doubted had been his. He'd glanced at the photograph of Bucky Barnes -_his photograph_- with furrowed brows as he read over and over the paragraphs beside it. He couldn't deny the man on the picture was him, and he bitterly thought that yes, it was him, but in another life.

And now, if anything, he could understand why Steve Rogers wanted to hold on to whatever humanity was left inside of him, even if he wasn't the Bucky Barnes he was looking for, not anymore.

James Buchanan Barnes had been extirpated over and over again. He could faintly remember that, for a short period of time, the electroconvulsive therapies were executed without a mouth guard and when they were done and he barely had the strength to open his eyes, the only thing he could identify completely was the bitter taste of blood on his mouth and lips that traveled down to his chin. A painful blackout that successfully only made him see red.

He slowly adopted a sitting position at the tub, letting wet strands of hair linger on his face for a second before slicking it back and letting droplets of water fall freely down his already damp back.

The absence of blood flow from the wound on his hand told him he'd been underwater for three minutes. The heave on his chest said ten. His mind, a minute.

The Winter Soldier realized that, even if his mind was only able to recall useless tidbits of information at the time, somehow, someday, they would turn into something comprehensible. But it would require time, more time that he wanted it to be.

For now, he had to lay low.

The rest was just letting the chips fall where they may.

* * *

Disclaimer: Captain America and its characters belong to Marvel.


End file.
